To change the voice (I prefer Alex from the built in options), open System Preferences, and then go to the Speech icon.

Your Mac will start to read in the voice selected in the System Preferences.

Click and drag across the text you want read aloud, and then hit Option-Esc. Open up a book from your Amazon account and find a page you want your Mac to read.

Double click on the Kindle app, and login with your Amazon log in credentials. dmg image file, and drag the Kindle app to your Applications folder. If you have a Kindle account, then, you can download the Kindle app from the web here. This bums me out on a personal level, since I like the Barnes and Noble e-reading devices better than Amazon’s competing products, but that’s really here nor there for this discussion. Here’s how.įirst up, know right off that this trick won’t work with the Nook for Mac app, sadly. There is a way to get your Mac to read Kindle books to you, out loud, with its built-in text to speech software, but it’s not as intuitive as you might think. What about the Mac, you might ask? Can’t you just turn on VoiceOver on the Mac and have it read ebooks to you? Not if you use an e-Reader software like Kindle or Nook, you can’t. If you want to listen to iBooks, or have a visual impairment that makes it tough to see the text on the iPad screen, you can turn on VoiceOver and have the iBook read to you. If you own an iPad, for instance, you might download audio books from iTunes or iBooks from that particular app, and then read right on your iPad. Lots of us like to listen to audiobooks, and lots of us buy ebooks across a variety of services and devices. To have Kathy voice your alert, simply add the following -v flag to your command, like so:įun to play with, for sure, and potentially helpful for anyone needing an audible notification that a specific task is finished in Terminal. If the voice you have chosen in System Preferences isn’t to your liking, you can also use a flag on the Terminal command to change voices on the fly (you’ll have to have the voice on your system, though, to make it work). When the text document is created, Terminal says, “all done, dude,” notifying me that I can hop back into terminal and do anything else I need to do there.

Can i talk into my mac and have it type